I have to learn the phonetic alphabet to be a pilot. This game made it easy:

From here

Uncategorized airplanes, flash, flying, game, nato, pilot

So, you have your Jailbroken iPod Touch or iPhone with 2.0 firmware running OpenSSH, and you have MxTube 1.5 or better, of course. What if you want one of those pesky videos that YouTube deletes all the time, like Paris Hilton For President? Or maybe you want a full movie on your iPod without having to sync to iTunes since you’re stuck in Linux Land. Well, here’s how:

Download the video

This can be done lots of ways, but somehow obtain a version of the video that ffmpeg can read. It can be just about any format. Let’s assume that we get a file called paris.flv.

Convert the video

ffmpeg -i paris.flv -b 500000 -s 176x144 -ac 1 -ab 64000 paris-high.mp4

This will make a nice movie for us to play. Let’s put it on the iPod:

scp paris-high.mp4 root@ipod:/var/mobile/Media/MxTube/

Make the Thumbnail

We need to grab a frame from the middle of the movie. Let’s use mplayer for that!

mplayer -vo jpeg -frames 1 -ss 30 paris.flv

This will make a file called 00000001.jpg. Let’s put that in the right spot:

scp 00000001.jpg root@ipod:/var/mobile/Media/MxTube/paris.thm

Add the video to the Library

Edit /var/mobile/Library/MxTube/VideoLibrary.plist on the iPod. Make a new dict entry in the list like so:

        <dict>
                <key>author</key>
                <string>hank</string>
                <key>duration</key>
                <string>01:50</string>
                <key>high</key>
                <string>/var/mobile/Media/MxTube/paris-high.mp4</string>
                <key>id</key>
                <string>64ad536a6dQ</string>
                <key>thumbnail</key>
                <string>/var/mobile/Media/MxTube/paris.thm</string>
                <key>title</key>
                <string>Paris for President</string>
        </dict>

Just fill in the right filenames for the thumbnail and movie like you used above. Also, change the author to yourself or the original director, and the duration accordingly. Keep the id something random. Also, you can change the display title as the last option there.

Other Pro Tips

Keep in mind that if you want to be able to delete the movie from the interface, you need to change the ownership on all the files to mobile:mobile using chown.

Results!

Well, it totally works, with sound even.

Good luck!

Uncategorized bash, flash, hack, howto, ipod, linux, ssh, videos, xml, youtube

The new July 2nd version of Flash Player 10 for Linux finally fixes the HTML overlay bug that we’ve been seeing for years. You can now see things on top of the flash elements on the page, like so:

Get it now!

Update

After trying it with YouTube and TheSixtyOne, and seeing some lame bugs, I decided to go back to Flash 9 and face the music on overlays.

Uncategorized close source, firefox, flash, linux

It’s pretty sick when an old man is hit by a driver and they don’t even have the common courtesy to stop.

Originally from here, but they took it down for some reason. It’s disturbing, but I see no reason to stop society from seeing itself.

Uncategorized car, flash, flv, sad, video

I decided after reading this article, I decided to try out SWFDec instead of Adobe Flash Player. I shied away from Gnash early on since it didn’t support many newer features of Flash, and it didn’t work with YouTube. But, apparently, SWFDec works with YouTube (I just tried it), and according to the article above, my browser may use less resources now. We’ll see.

Update

Well, it turns out it crashes on my TheSixtyOne player on the right! Time to try Gnash…

Update 2

Experiment over. The OSS Flash solutions completely fail at playing the flash audio on the right. Once they get just a little more compatible, I’ll try again.

Uncategorized firefox, flash, linux, open source

Man this is a fun game!

Uncategorized flash, fun, games, travel, world

I saw a post on Digg that caught my eye, and thought that this might be another way to gauge the amount of hardcore supporters each popular candidate has. I picked the following:

• Ron Paul
• Dennis Kucinich
• Barack Obama
• Hillary Clinton
• Rudy Giuliani
• Mitt Romney
• Mike Huckabee
• Fred Thompson
• John Edwards
• Mike Gravel
• John McCain

Now, you would think that the number of hardcore supporters should correlate nicely with the number of voters turning out in the primaries since one should think that anyone in a Meetup group would go vote come primary day. But, sadly, by the looks of it very few of the supporters of the “top-tier” Republican candidates are enthusiastic enough to join a Meetup group. I wonder why since this would help their campaigns immensely. Here’s the result:

Maybe they’re all just using a different site? Let me know what you think.

Uncategorized charts, election 2008, flash, politics, ron paul

I took this test to see which current presidential
candidates my views align with, and got some pretty surprising results:

It’s based on this table of the candidates views on popular issues, and how strong your feelings are on each one. A good tool indeed, and it should be publicized as a guideline for voters by our caring media since we all want voters to make informed decisions…

The graph led to this:

I have no explanation for this picture.

Uncategorized chart, election 2008, flash, life, politics

So, I saw these like a week ago, and then spent about 5 days getting the high-definition versions from the terrible World of Warcraft Bittorrent trackers. Finally, I have them.

Shatner High Definition Version (8 MB)

Mr. T High Definition Version (8 MB)

Uncategorized flash, mr. t, shatner, videos, world of warcraft

I decided today that I wanted to track my calories burned per day on a nice line graph. I did it, and I think I will continue. The total is automatically calculated by the PHP data source. This was made using my Mephisto Plugin for Open Flash Charts.

Uncategorized charts, exercise, flash, graphs, health, mephisto, php, plugins